Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

Saturday, 1 November 2008

Yes I would agree the Holocaust has lost much of its magic, it's a little like watching the Sound of Music a thousand times. Let us all now move on to the Jewish involvement in the Soviet gulags and the Ukranian Holomodor.Holocaust is over, leading Israeli tells Likud

Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem – The Independent November 1, 2008

Benjamin Netanyahu, a front-runner for the Israeli premiership, has been severely criticised by a former Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency for comparing the threat posed by Iran to that of pre-war Nazi Germany. Mr Netanyahu, whose Likud Party is running neck and neck in the polls with Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni, has gone further than his rivals in implying he might authorise a unilateral attack on Iranian nuclear installations.

Avraham Burg, whose new book The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes is out in Britain this weekend, says in an interview with The Independent Magazine that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is “no doubt a problem”. Mr Burg adds: “He is an issue in the Western world and for Israel’s sense of confidence in particular.” But he continues: “What is [Mr Netanyahu’s] soundbite? ‘It is [19]38 all over again. Do me a favour. Did we have such a powerful state in ’38? Did we have this onmipotent army in ’38? Did we have the most important superpowers siding with us in ’38? Did we have the Catholic church taking a |different attitude in ’38? It’s not ’38, however you look at it. And even Ahmadinejad, when you compare him with Hitler, you diminish Hitler.”

Mr Burg’s book, in part a plea to fellow Israelis more than 60 years after the Holocaust to stop seeing themselves as “a nation of victims”, caused furious debate when the Hebrew version became a bestseller in Israel last year. The new translation is likely to provoke similar argument, particularly in the US. Mr Burg, a strong Barack Obama supporter, says “a dialoguing President is better than a shooter” and that George Bush has been a “disaster for the world and for Israel”. He argues against Israel defining itself as a “Jewish state” instead of as a “state for the Jewish people which belongs to all its citizens” – including Arabs.

Mr Burg, who does not rule out a return to Israeli politics, also warns that the days for a two-state solution are “numbered” because Israeli and Palestinian societies have been “abducted” by fundamentalists. An opponent of the occupation of Palestinian territories, Mr Burg makes a plea for the EU to become more involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and for Israel to reconsider its “orientation” of “Europhobia” and “Americophilia”. He says a solution may lie in a federation of Israeli and Palestinian entities, perhaps as part of a regional body including Arab states worried about Iranian hegemony. Mr Burg suggests the EU might eventually hold out membership to the region, including Israel and the Palestinians, as a peace incentive.

AL-KHALIL, (PIC)-- Three Journalists and a number of local residents of the southern West Bank city of al-Khalil were wounded on Friday as a result of an assault by extremists Jewish settlers.

Local sources said that masked Jewish settlers attacked three journalists who were covering the assaults on the family of Khalifa Da'na in their house which is adjacent to the Kharsina settlement to the north east of al-Khalil. The journalists sustained wounds and bruises.

The same sources said that Hazem Bader (41), the AFP correspondent, received head injuries and that Yusri al-Jamal (31), Reuters correspondent, was injured in his right foot, both were taken to the Ahli Hospital in al-Khalil.

The settlers also attacked Eyad Hamad, the AP correspondent, was bruised on his left foot and received first aid, but did no need to be hospitalised.

Members of the family of Da'na were assaulted and contents of their house were destroyed by the attacking settlers.

On Thursday evening, 4-5 settlers from the same settlement attacked the home of a 95-year-old Palestinian woman throwing stones and breaking windows. Neighbours called the police but they failed to show up.

Sources close to Sheikh Salah said he was turned back at the Sheikh Husain bridge crossing.

He was on his way to attend a festival he was invited to by the Islamic Action Front in the capital Amman where he was going to be a key-speaker on the dangers engulfing the Aqsa Mosque.

The Jordanian authorities stopped Sheikh Salah at the border-crossing and questioned him, then asked him to wait. After half an hour he was told that there was a decision from Amman barring him from entering Jordan.

Sheikh Salah has been dubbed as the "Sheikh of the Aqsa Mosque" for his tireless work to protect the Aqsa Mosque from the Israeli occupation malicious schemes. His work resulted in him being imprisoned by the Israel occupation, being barred from praying in the Aqsa Mosque and his life being threatened.

Syria threatened Wednesday to cut off security cooperation along the Iraqi border if there are more American raids on Syrian territory, and the U.S. . . .

Earlier, the Syrian government demanded that Washington apologize for Sunday’s cross-border helicopter strike by American special forces that killed eight people. U.S. military officials said the raid killed a top al-Qaida in Iraq operative who was about to conduct an attack in Iraq. [1]

(Ah. Al-Qaida in Iraq. Brilliant and original.)

To a shrewd journalist (editor, ultimately), this is where the identity of the victims or the verity of the U.S. and Syrian claims are examined; perhaps the attack and the response are put into the context of U.S. and international norms (laws, conventions), or how serious an offense it was.

But this is AP.

The Syrian reply to the neocop-out arrives about 63½ paragraphs down; in the meantime, some run-o-the-mill editorializing against Syria:

Though Syria has long been viewed by the U.S. as a destabilizing country in the Middle East, attacks on its territory are rare and Damascus has been trying in recent months to change its image and end years of global seclusion.

No. Damascus has been trying to avoid victimhood, Baghdad-style. The only ones “seclu[ding]” them are the neocons, their UN veto, fellow UN and NATO mafiosi, and any UNSC member they can coerce.

Syria also has agreed to establish diplomatic ties with Lebanon - a country it used to dominate - for the first time in their history.

OK. And what country dominates Iraq and Afghanistan? Which one dominates Palestine? Whose U.S. “dollars” are looted to subsidize all three dominations?

CHIRP CHIRP… CHIRP

Now comes the Syrian rebuttal to the “al-Qaida in Iraq” claim (after another reading from the Gospel according to State, of course):

There has been no formal acknowledgment of the raid from the United States. But U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said the target was Badran Turki al-Mazidih, a top al-Qaida in Iraq figure who operated a network of smuggling fighters across the border. The Iraqi national also goes by the name Abu Ghadiyah.

Mekdad rejected the U.S. reports and insisted all those killed were Syrians.

“The allegation that this person was killed is a false claim. Therefore, a search for him by world intelligence agencies, including Syria’s, should continue,” he said.

The fact that the Syrians are visibly indignant (as they should be, and as the neothugs surely predicted) gives the vultures at MSM Inc. a great foreground to the customary Good U.S. Empire v. Evil Arabs backdrop:

With tensions between the U.S. and Syria on the rise, the U.S. Embassy advised Americans to avoid Thursday’s demonstrations and review their personal security. Past protests have occasionally turned violent.

In 1998, small groups trashed the U.S. ambassador’s residence and entered the American and British cultural centers in Damascus to protest U.S.-British airstrikes on Iraq. In 2006, thousands protesting newspaper caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad burned the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus.

It would have been nice if those Syrians murdered in the SOCOM-wannabe mission were ”advised” of the danger they were doomed to face.

It wasn’t Syria that apparently committed mass murder against innocent non-combatants; so why are only Syrian actions being put under the microscope? AP is simply inverting reality here.

Also sorely missing in all this “coverage” is a perspective relative to legal standards. (If Syria did the aggression against U.S. or Israeli targets, AP might have given a half-page worth of legal context to justify any reaction.) What if Syria wanted to sue the U.S. government or try Bush & Co. for aggression? How many countries would join them? Who would protest? Would AP trot out the legal points then?

Sure, long as they can be used to defend the empire.

International law, the UN, and other allegedly well-intentioned international entities are simply tools for states against peoples and other states. Individuals, villages, towns, states, and economies get demolished with every UN and NATO intervention. Since its inception — with the help of empire-apologizing corporate media — the UN has facilitated exactly what it was formed to prevent: aggressive war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and empire. Sure, the same international laws and agreements the neocons supposedly cite against their preferred enemies may be leveled against the neocons — one of these decades. But that is not likely before the empire falls under its own weight, and the empire is many decades too old — many enterprises too big — as it is.

Ideally, the neothug empire should be reined in on constitutional grounds.

The U.S. Constitution carries supreme authority over the actions of U.S. officials, and precedes any international agreement not in the spirit of the Constitution. When observed, it can not be used, as it currently is, to justify economy-crippling UN sanctions against defenseless people or states (Palestine, Iran, and the like). Foreign aid is unconstitutional; so are undeclared wars and preemptive wars, and cross-border merc raids into non-warring countries, ordered by who-knows-whom. According to the Constitution of the United States of America, the United States never should have joined the United Nations or NATO — global shakedown rackets, both. And the arbitrary “allocation” of taxpayer money for the nationalization of banking and financial institutions and other MIC racketeers? That’s unconstitutional too.

But you wouldn’t know any of this by watching “the most trusted name in news,” or by reading the “newspaper of record” or the “world’s largest and most trusted source of news and information.”

Imagine how ethical the U.S. government could eventually be if the largest and most influential news media diligently reported the actions of government on ethical grounds: the proper role of government, according to the most authoritative legal and moral standards. Imagine the natural breakup of the government-sanctioned monopolies in health care, medicine, education, home mortgages, and “defense.” No more MIC, no more empire, and true peace and prosperity.

Plan F :go back to the USA and declare that you did all that invading , bombing and killingfor the sake of "Freedom and Democracy"and then ,later, go to plan G .

Plan G:collect your old-age-pension from ENRONif you find that Enron , is already bankrupted .never mind, sit down and wait .......Halliburton or Bechtel might pay you a dividentif not ......never mind !!Judd Bush, the next President,will find you other places to liberate .

Sherlock Hommos , PhDPlaning hypocritical Disadventure's20th day of January 2006

ROBERT DREYFUSS:Well, you know, part of the problem, of course, is that there are conflicting reports about what happened and what didn’t happen. But it appears, at least, that this was not just an air raid, but this was actually a raid involving commandos and helicopters, something like the attack, I would say, that happened on September 3rd, the one and only time that we know about in Afghanistan where American forces crossed into Pakistan and conducted an on-the-ground raid inside Pakistan.

In both of these cases, they seem to be the logical expression of a decision that was made over the summer by the President, allowing US Special Operations Forces to conduct these cross-border or hot-pursuit raids into countries—in Pakistan’s case, an ally, and in Syria’s case, an adversary, I guess—to conduct these cross-border raids against people who the United States decided that it didn’t like, based on intelligence. We have, you know, extremely aggressive intelligence methods and surveillance and drone aircraft and everything else that watch these people, sometimes for hours or days at a time. And it, in turn, raises the question now of whether the United States might consider similar raids into Iran, which is in—over the past two years, has been increasingly blamed by the United States for supporting militant activity by especially Shiites in Iraq, based in training camps and transit facilities and so forth, both outside Tehran and along the Iran-Iraq border.

I describe this as kind of a parallel doctrine to the Bush Doctrine, where you had earlier the Bush Doctrine that said we can conduct preventive military action against countries that, you know, we perceive to be possibly threatening.In this case now, we’re conducting Special Forces or commando attacks against bases or facilities in countries that we think are harboring people who are conducting attacks on American or allied forces. This is a very, very, very troubling thing. If you go back to the origins, the beginning of the so-called war on terrorism, this is what it was supposed to look like.

And last week, I went to see Mike Vickers, who commands the Special Operations Forces—not commands them, but he’s the Assistant Secretary of Defense. He described how that unit—that those forces have doubled pretty much under the Bush administration and are set for further expansion. And this is a huge tool that’s now been created that can be used in many, many situations, in many countries. He said they operate now in sixty countries. So, this is potentially amajor escalation of the war on terrorism just at the declining days of the Bush administration.

JUAN GONZALEZ:And, Robert Dreyfuss, the impact within Iraq itself? I mean, obviously already, one of the sticking points in reaching an agreement with the Iraqi government over the retention of US forces in Iraq is the issue that the Iraqi government is now saying, “Well, we want this agreement to include that there will be no attacks on other countries by US forces on Iraqi soil.”

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Yeah. This pretty much, you know, puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the US and Iraq are going to come to some kind of Status of Forces Agreement. I’ve been saying for six months that there was no chance that this agreement could be signed, because of opposition inside Iraq.

The big irony here is that, only recently, Syria decided to send an ambassador to Iraq and, by the way, also send an ambassador to Lebanon, two major steps by Syria to try to build bridges both to its neighboring countries, but to the world at large. And this is a huge slap in the face to that effort.

The Iraqis now have protested the attack on Syria. They’ve promised the Syrians that they would conduct their own investigation and report to Damascus about what they find out. And this has created a nationalist backlash inside Iraq that I think is astonishingly bad for any effort by the Bush administration to try to conclude this agreement about what US forces can and can’t do from Iraq. Now, maybe that happened because they realize that it’s already too late for that agreement, and there won’t be any agreements. So it looks like that’s going back to the United Nations sometime next month......"

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, I want to thank you for being with this, investigative reporter, contributing editor at The Nation, author of Devil’s Game. His blog is “The Dreyfuss Report”. Joshua Landis, co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He writes "Syria Comment,” a daily online newsletter on Syrian politics, at joshualandis.com/blog.

Thursday, 30 October 2008

Vice President of the European Parliament (EP) Luisa Morgantini welcomed Wednesday the arrival of a boat in Gaza carrying humanitarian aid for Palestinians in a move that defies and breaks the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip.

"This represents an extraordinary success and a strong message sent by the representatives of the Free Gaza Campaign, who organized the trip in collaboration with international activists," said the Italian Member of EP in a statement.

It was the second time in three months that a boat arrived in Gaza Strip despite of the Israeli siege.

"Many people supported this action and we should thank all of them, including the Greek and Cypriot authorities who didn't accept any pressures by Israel in order to impede the boat to sail towards Gaza, where against all humanitarian and international law, 1.5 million people are suffering under an Israeli-led blockade since June 2007," noted the statement.

She called on the European Union to intervene at once in order to help the homeless and also ask the Egyptian government for the freedom of movement for Palestinians.

"I am deeply convinced that the right way to follow is a great movement of non-violent protests against all violations of human rights and legality for Palestinians not only from Gaza Strip, but also from the West Bank. They need a strong international solidarity and the commitment of all governments and diplomacy, to put an end to the siege and to the Israeli military occupation on 1967 territories," stressed Morgantini.

From October 30th until November 4th, Morgantini will participate in an official EP delegation visit to the Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip.

Greg Felton, a Canadian investigative reporter and author, spoke on Feb. 25, 2008 at the Vancouver Public Library about his controversial book, “The Host and The Parasite” Watch 30-minute video of his presentation and 30-minute highlights of the heated questions and answers.

Part 1: presentation of Greg Felton, author of “The Host and The Parasite”

It has been long understood that our federal government is going deeper into debt, consistently raising the debt ceiling and demonstrating no fiscal restraint. In recent years, debt ceiling increases have been placed in “must pass” legislation as a means to guarantee that Republicans as well as Democrats would vote for them when Congress was under Republican control.

We also know our nation’s “negative savings rate” reflects the habits of private citizens, showing those habits to be not tremendously different than the habits of the public sector. Yet, the signs of decline are becoming ever more apparent. So apparent, in fact, that it seems unlikely that bailouts or other gimmicks will have even short-term success. More inflation, and creating moral hazard by bailing out egregious offenders, is a recipe for disaster. These activities can seem to provide some short-term relief, but it seems we are now at a significant crisis point, where monetary policy gimmicks don’t provide the band-aids they did in the past.

Not only is our nation on the verge of bankruptcy, but so are its people and private institutions. We are now repeatedly hearing about businesses “needing to access the credit market to make payroll.” This is an unmistakable sign of more dire consequences ahead for the economy. If businesses must borrow just to make payroll, this is evidence of a severe undercapitalization that cannot be sustained, even for the short run.

Couple these facts with items such as the explosion of the “payday loan” industry and the unmasking of the false sense of economic well-being is nearly complete. These payday loan companies use preferred access to easy credit to inject cash into the hands of the working poor. They are nearly always set up in lower-income neighborhoods. These people, who are struggling to buy food and pay rent, get addicted to the credit drug. Their standard of living is only further depressed by the interest payments on these loans that make them profitable to their providers. Thus, the recipients are left even less capable of paying for items such as food and housing in the long run, without using this credit again and again.

These people are often the very ones being paid by businesses who “borrow to make payroll.” This is the dark underbelly of the fiat money, borrow-and-spend economy this nation has been building. As the government takes over more and more functions of the economy many see the rise of socialism as an antidote to this failure of “capitalism.” However, the fact remains that our economy has been increasingly running on debt, not capital. Capitalism does not exist without capital and debt is not, has never been and will never be a form of capital. Only now are we seeing the more dire implications of an economy without capital.

"I've never seen a President — I don't care who he is — stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have got on our government, they would RISE UP IN ARMS. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."

Three more people in masks came into the room. They blindfolded me, put a hood over my head… they kicked and slapped me. They beat me with a plastic pipe and whatever they could get their hands on. I couldn't see anything because I was blindfolded. I just felt the blows. That lasted ten to fifteen minutes… Later they stood me on a chair and told me to grab a pipe that was fixed to the wall. They removed the chair from under me and left me hanging in the air, with my handcuffed hands holding onto the pipe and the weight of my body, hanging in the air, drawing my hands downwards. They left the room. - Ismail Sabatin, 17 years old.

So begins Stolen Youth, a book about Israel's detention of Palestinian children that will be released in March 2004. Isma'il Sabatin's story, the authors of the book remind us, is paralleled by the stories of the "nearly 2,000 Palestinian children from the Occupied Palestinian Territories whom the Israeli authorities have arrested over the last three years." Some spend a few days in detention - detained, beaten, and released. Others spend years there.

At any given time there are probably hundreds of Palestinian children in detention, with some 350 in detention at the beginning of 2003. In 2002 one-fifth were between 13-14, the rest between 15-17. The military and police tend to target children between 12-17, but have arrested children as young as nine.

Children are arrested "at checkpoints, on the street, or at their homes by heavily armed Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. The soldiers take them to detention centres in Israeli settlements or military camps… the children are interrogated. This almost always involves some form of torture or abuse, including sleep and food deprivation, threatening language, beatings with heavy batons, being punched and kicked, as well as being tied in painful and contorted positions for long periods of time…"

After interrogation, children are brought before a military 'court' that operates under a different set of laws than those that apply for Israelis. Where Israelis come under Israeli civil law, Palestinians fall under military orders. Whereas Israeli children, including Israeli children in settlements in the occupied territories, get child-specific courts and procedures, Palestinian children are tried by the same Israeli military courts and judges as try Palestinian adults. The rules of evidence and procedure are such that it does not make sense to call the institutions that decide where to incarcerate Palestinian children 'courts' at all. When these 'courts' have made their decisions, most Palestinian children are incarcerated in Israel itself, with children of 16-17 treated as adults by Israel's military laws (according to these laws, Israeli children are children if they are under 18, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but Palestinian children are adults if they 16 or over). Visiting the children in prison is impossible for family members, given the permanent closure of the Occupied Territories that existed long before the territories were physically walled in as they are now, with the Gaza Strip being surrounded by electric fence and the West Bank nearly surrounded by the apartheid wall. But not content to simply wall and fence Palestinians in on all sides, Israel proceeds to round them up and take them off to prisons inside Israel.

Indeed, prison is "a central feature of Palestinian life", with over 600,000 Palestinians having spent time in prison since 1967 (the population in the Occupied Territories is around 3 million). Prison, Cook, Hanieh, and Kay argue, including the detention of children, is part of Israel's system of control, "permeating every aspect of Palestinian life. It is a system backed by legal, political, economic, cultural and psychological structures, and designed to keep more than 3 million people under submission."

The authors of Stolen Youth worked for Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) between 1999-2003. Their work is based on the human rights reports of Bt'selem, The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Physicians for Human Rights, the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, on the DCI/PS case files, the Israeli press, and their own research, the interviews and testimonies of children, lawyers, advocates, and families. Meticulously documented and carefully researched, it is a crystal-clear and truly damning indictment of an abominable practice. But it is far more than that: it is an indictment of the entire system of control and domination that leads directly to the moral degradation, the racism, and the inhumanity that makes the detention and torture of children acceptable and justifiable not only to Israel, but to its 'supporters' in the 'international community' as well.

The testimoniesReaders of Stolen Youth will be struck by the near-complete absence of rhetoric, opinion, or even adjectives. Given the appalling nature of the subject matter, the authors' ability to retain rationality and analytical clarity is an achievement in itself. Indeed, most of the exceptional writers in English on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Amira Hass, Tanya Reinhart, Hanan Ashrawi, Gideon Levy (frequently quoted in the book), Baruch Kimmerling, Noam Chomsky, Ali Abunimah, and the late Edward Said (to name a few), often exude passion and anger in their writing. Cook, Hanieh, and Kay instead marshall the evidence and let it speak for itself.

The evidence does speak, and it, presented in an unadorned fashion, evokes more emotion than any rhetorical questions, understatement, sarcasm, or metaphor could. Readers learn that "Israeli settlers are… empowered to arrest any Palestinian, with no warrant required." They hear about Riham Musa, a 15-year old girl who "was shot several times by Israeli soldiers who accused her of trying to stab one of them with a knife." They hear her testimony: "When the soldiers saw me, they opened fire on me and I was hit in the stomach, although I didn't fall to the ground. I kept standing in the same spot, not moving, so that they would stop shooting.

However, another soldier shot me in the leg and then I fell to the ground. Many soldiers appeared and started to cordon off the area, but none of them came near me. They asked me - from a distance - to take all my clothes off except my underwear, so that they could examine them… They took them, even though I was wounded and bleeding." They learn how Riham, in hospital, was "shackled to her hospital bed," provoking Physicians for Human Rights Israel to note that "It is unreasonable to think that a 15-year old girl, who was hit in the kidney, had part of her intestine surgically removed, is attached to an intravenous solution, and two bullets are still in her body, will escape from the hospital by overcoming the IDF guards" and how, despite this, "20 days after her arrest, she remained handcuffed to the bed."

Readers learn about the detention centres, like Ofer Detention Centre, which a lawyer visiting in May 2002 described as having "over 900 detainees, including 40 of 50 children", in tents "erected over an asphalt surface", "filled with dust and insects", "each tent holding between 25 and 35 prisoners", each detainee given "four dirty blankets". For food, they "were given frozen schnitzels, which they had to place in the sun to defrost… A couple of cucumbers and pieces of fruit are provided for every ten detainees. A small container of yogurt is also given to every ten prisoners," who are not given plates "and instead every eight prisoners are forced to eat collectively from a large bowl", hygenic conditions are abysmal so "in two sections, open sewage runs from the pipes into the tents… At night, soldiers harrass the detainees by firing bullets into the air, throwing gravel at the tents and yelling at the prisoners."

Readers learn about "position abuse", which "involves forcing detainees into contorted positions for very long periods," about sleep deprivation, threats, and pressures applied to children to try to get them to become collaborators with Israeli security services - a practice whose intent is to undermine and create discord in Palestinian society as much as to justify the existence of the 'security' services themselves.

The book describes the military court system, a farce for a wide variety of reasons exposed by the authors by simply pointing out the divergence between Israeli civil law and the military orders that apply to Palestinians. A few examples described in the book:-As mentioned above, Israeli children are defined as people under 18 years old, Palestinians under 16.-Israeli children must be brought before juvenile court. Palestinian children do not, and have no special provisions made for them.-Police can only detain Israeli children without warrant in "eight specific circumstances", while Palestinian children can be arrested "merely on the suspicion that the child has violated a military order."-Israeli children can only be detained for ten days before sentencing, extensible to a maximum of 75 days by order of the Attorney General. Palestinian children can be imprisoned for up to six months without indictment.-Israelis have the right to see a lawyer as soon as possible, while Palestinians' rights to representation are subject to military orders, which change frequently. In 2002, Palestinians could automatically denied their right to see a lawyer for 18 days, extensible for up to 90 days, under military order 1500.

The book describes much more.The logic of atrocityThe evidence marshaled on the Israeli prison system is supplemented by a chapter on the international legal protections of the rights of the child, cruelly mocked by Israel's prison system, and a chapter on the psychological and social impacts of imprisonment and torture on children and on society more generally. These chapters sharpen the points made by the presentation of the prison system itself: that Israel is engaged in a completely illegal, immoral attempt to destroy Palestinian society.

Several other chapters present the authors' analysis of the historical context in which Israel's detention of Palestinian children evolved. In chapter 2, the authors show how: "Israel's strategy towards the OPT forms a continuum from 1967 to the present day. The essential goal has always been to control the land, the economy, and the resources without assuming direct responsibility for the resident Palestinian population."

Following Raja Shehadeh, they present an analysis in terms of 'phases of control': From 1967-71, a system of military orders controlled movement, expropriated land, and took over administration. 1971-79 saw the beginning of Israeli settlements. 1979-81 created a dual system of laws: one for settlers in the territories, the other for Palestinians in the territories. 1981-1993 consolidated Israel's control over the West Bank and, in particular, its economy. 1993-2000 were the Oslo years, in which "Israel ostensibly gave up direct responsibility for the Palestinian population… but retained absolute control through a military, economic, political and legal framework", which created "an illusion of sovereignty" while "the actual occupation… intensified." For 2000 to the present, in the second intifada, the authors quote Ariel Sharon in March 2002, who said that Palestinians "have to be hit hard, and it has to hurt them… Israel must cause them losses, victims, so that they will feel it." This current phase has seen a marked increase in the incarceration of children, killings of children and adults in military incursions, the destruction of residential areas with military bulldozers, curfews, checkpoints, and an encroaching humanitarian disaster, with chronic malnutrition among children around 20% in the Gaza Strip.

The authors present this analysis to dispel the idea that the problem of incarceration of children could be solved by changing the Israeli prison system so that it conforms to international humanitarian standards. Instead, the authors encourage readers to understand that the prison system is component of a system of control that is illegal and immoral to begin with, a system of military occupation that is based on dispossessing and destroying Palestinian society: "The policies of incarceration exist to stifle resistance against occupation and will be brought to bear when needed…. Israel's policies of detention will be halted only when the occupation which they are designed to support is also ended."

How Israel gets away with itIn a chapter on "the foundations of Israel's impunity", the authors describe the 'security discourse' that Israel deploys to silence critics of its human rights violations. Some might be familiar with the philosophy seminar trick deployed to try to win agreement for moral relativism and torture. This trick was utilized by a justice of the Israeli High Court, whose advocacy of a one-year delay in preventing the use of torture by Israel's security services is quoted in Stolen Youth: "Deriving from the will to prevent a situation where the 'time bomb will tick' before our eyes and the State's hand will be shortened to help, I suggest that the judgment be suspended from coming into force for a period of one year. During that year, the GSS [Shabak, Israeli security] could employ exceptional methods in those rare cases of 'ticking time bombs', on the condition that explicit authorization is given by the Attorney General."

Given that all Palestinians, including children, are presented (and seen) as 'ticking time bombs' in Israel's (and North America's) media, the door is wide open to torture and other inhumane practices. Israel deploys the 'security discourse' to justify everything, from imprisonment to the apartheid wall, from checkpoints and incursions to closures and starvation, to great effect. Israel's use of the 'security discourse' is helped by a tendency in human rights forums to "reduce struggles for equality to a checklist of 'violations' in which the record of the oppressed is compared with that of the oppressor. This is clearly demonstrated in the Palestinian case, where the just cause of national liberation has been elided into the nebulous and apparently neutral term 'the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'. In other words, a struggle against oppression has been reduced to a dispute where both sides are equally at fault, and some kind of power equality is assumed."

Meanwhile the Palestinians "have not had powerful sponsors, nor has the systematic violation of their rights posed a threat to international equilibrium, or to political economic interests, sufficiently compelling for states to actively intervene." Instead, external powers, notably the United States (but not only the US), support Israel militarily, economically, and diplomatically. This "sends a very strong message to Palestinian civilians: international law does not apply to you; it does not protect you."

The authors argue that this situation will not change unless change is "sought on the streets and not simply in the parliaments and halls of government. Activists must move beyond information dissemination confined largely to like-minded groups and build strategic alliances that will create an environment where governmental support for criminal regimes becomes impossible to sustain." Part of building these alliances, they say, is understanding "the common links between the Palestinian struggle and other struggles against oppression around the globe."

These links ought to be dramatically obvious in North America, and especially in the United States, with its prison-industry complex, whose incarcerated population is 2 million and growing, where violations are also routine and systematic, and whose root causes are equally infrequently examined. By shining a bright light on both the brutality and the root of Israel's prison system through the eyes of its most vulnerable victims, the authors of Stolen Youth have provided information that will help people understand those "common links" and make the "strategic alliances" that are so necessary.

Sousa is, or at least should be, aware of the role the International Solidarity Movements played in helping to restore Democracy to her native Argentina during the days of the fascist dictatorship there. Is it not expecting to much for a person such as herself, a well known advocate of Human Rights, to do the same here?

SHAME ON YOU MERCEDES SOUSA!

As for Islam, his actions are nothing less than a disgrace. For a man of his stature to turn his back on his own Islamic brothers and sisters is an unforgivable crime. Much more was expected of him.

1."There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

2."The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3." [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4."The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5."When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6."How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7."There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8."The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9.David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10.Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11."We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12."Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13."We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14."We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15."We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16."We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17."Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18."We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19.Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20."There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21."Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22."It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23."Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

25."We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26."We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).

27."We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

In his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals, Mr. Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be plowed to provide food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the illegitimately repossesed lands.

Mr. Giladi couldn't get his book published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered that he could do so only by personally funding the project.

The Giladis, now U.S. citizens, live in New York City. By choice, they no longer hold Israeli citizenship. "I am Iraqi," he told The Link, "born in Iraq, my culture still Iraqi Arabic, my religion Jewish, my citizenship American."

The Link, honored in 1998 by the International Writers and Artists Association, is published by Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU).

In the [?] edition of The Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate land confiscated by the Zionists. Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued" these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those "rescued" Jews, Naeim Giladi, knows otherwise.

Naeim Giladi: "I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first Prime Minister of Israel called 'cruel Zionism'. I write about it because I was part of it."

John F. Mahoney, Executive Director, AMEU: "The Link interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on March 16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday. For nearly two other delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi. "It's our Arab culture," he said proudly".

THE JEWS OF IRAQ
By Naeim Giladi

Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.

I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers did everything they could to extract the names of my co-conspirators. Fifty years later, pain still throbs in my right toe, a reminder of the day my captors used pliers to remove my toenails. On another occasion, they hauled me to the flat roof of the prison, stripped me bare on a frigid January day, then threw a bucket of cold water over me. I was left there, chained to the railing, for hours. But I never once considered giving them the information they wanted. I was a true believer.

My preoccupation during what I refer to as my "two years in hell" was with survival and escape. I had no interest then in the broad sweep of Jewish history in Iraq even though my family had been part of it right from the beginning. We were originally Haroons, a large and important family of the "Babylonian Diaspora." My ancestors had settled in Iraq more than 2,600 years ago, 600 years before Christianity, and 1,200 years before Islam. I am descended from Jews who built the tomb of Yehezkel [The Prophet Ezekiel], a Jewish prophet of pre-biblical times. My town, where I was born in 1929, is Hillah, not far from the ancient site of Babylon.

The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance-and opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became Iraq, experienced periods of oppression and discrimination depending on the rulers of the period, their general trajectory over two and one-half millennia was upward. Under the late Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities flourished without outside interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business.

As I sat there in my cell, unaware that a death sentence soon would be handed down against me, I could not have recounted any personal grievances that my family members would have lodged against the government or the Muslim majority. Our family had been treated well and had prospered, first as farmers with some 50,000 acres devoted to rice, dates and Arab horses.

Then, with the Ottomans, we bought and purified gold that was shipped to Istanbul and turned into coinage. The Turks were responsible in fact for changing our name to reflect our occupation-we became Khalaschi, meaning "Makers of Pure."

I did not volunteer the information to my father that I had joined the Zionist underground. He found out several months before I was arrested when he saw me writing Hebrew and using words and expressions unfamiliar to him. He was even more surprised to learn that, yes, I had decided I would soon move to Israel myself. He was scornful. "You'll come back with your tail between your legs," he predicted.

About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs. But my mother and father were among the 6,000 who did not go to Israel. Although physically I never did return to Iraq-that bridge had been burned in any event-my heart has made the journey there many, many times. My father had it right.

I was imprisoned at the military camp of Abu-Greib, about 7 miles from Baghdad. When the military court handed down my sentence of death by hanging, I had nothing to lose by attempting the escape I had been planning for many months.

It was a strange recipe for an escape: a dab of butter, an orange peel, and some army clothing that I had asked a friend to buy for me at a flea market. I deliberately ate as much bread as I could to put on fat in anticipation of the day I became 18, when they could formally charge me with a crime and attach the 50-pound ball and chain that was standard prisoner issue.

Later, after my leg had been shackled, I went on a starvation diet that often left me weak-kneed.The pat of butter was to lubricate my leg in preparation for extricating it from the metal band.The orange peel I surreptitiously stuck into the lock on the night of my planned escape, having studied how it could be placed in such a way as to keep the lock from closing.

As the jailers turned to go after locking up, I put on the old army issue that was indistinguishable from what they were wearing-a long, green coat and a stocking cap that I pulleddown over much of my face (it was winter). Then I just quietly opened the door and joined the departing group of soldiers as they strode down the hall and outside, and I offered a "good night" to the shift guard as I left. A friend with a car was waiting to speed me away.

Later I made my way to the new state of Israel, arriving in May, 1950. My passport had my name in Arabic and English, but the English couldn't capture the "kh" sound, so it was rendered simply as Klaski. At the border, the immigration people applied the English version, which had an Eastern European, Ashkenazi ring to it. In one way, this "mistake" was my key to discovering very soon just how the Israeli caste system worked.

They asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was the son of a farmer; I knew allthe problems of the farm, so I volunteered to go to Dafnah, a farming kibbutz in the high Galilee. I only lasted a few weeks. The new immigrants were given the worst of everything. The food was the same, but that was the only thing that everyone had in common. For the immigrants, bad cigarettes, even bad toothpaste. Everything. I left.

Then, through the Jewish Agency, I was advised to go to al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon), an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, very close to the Mediterranean. The Israeli government planned to turn it into a farmers' city, so my farm background would be an asset there.

When I reported to the Labor Office in al-Majdal, they saw that I could read and write Arabic and Hebrew and they said that I could find a good-paying job with the Military Governor's office.The Arabs were under the authority of these Israeli Military Governors. A clerk handed me a bunch of forms in Arabic and Hebrew. Now it dawned on me. Before Israel could establish its farmers' city, it had to rid al-Majdal of its indigenous Palestinians. The forms were petitions to the United Nations Inspectors asking for transfer out of Israel to Gaza, which was under Egyptian control.

I read over the petition. In signing, the Palestinian would be saying that he was of sound mind and body and was making the request for transfer free of pressure or duress. Of course, there was no way that they would leave without being pressured to do so. These families had been there hundreds of years, as farmers, primitive artisans, weavers. The Military Governor prohibited them from pursuing their livelihoods, just penned them up until they lost hope of resuming their normal lives. That's when they signed to leave.

I was there and heard their grief. "Our hearts are in pain when we look at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if we leave His trees untended." I asked the Military Governor to give them relief, but he said, "No, we want them to leave." I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force-just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza. About four thousand people were driven from al-Majdal in one way or another. The few who remained were collaborators with the Israeli authorities.

Subsequently, I wrote letters trying to get a government job elsewhere and I got many immediate responses asking me to come for an interview. Then they would discover that my face didn't match my Polish/Ashkenazi name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I didn't, they would ask where I came by a Polish name. Desperate for a good job, I would usually say that I thought my great-grandfather was from Poland. I was advised time and again that "we'll give you a call."

Eventually, three to four years after coming to Israel, I changed my name to Giladi, which is close to the code name, Gilad, that I had in the Zionist underground. Klaski wasn't doing me any good anyway, and my Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didn't go with my origins as an Iraqi Jew.

I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.

And I began to find out about the barbaric methods used to rid the fledgling state of as many Palestinians as possible. The world recoils today at the thought of bacteriological warfare, but Israel was probably the first to actually use it in the Middle East. In the 1948 war, Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their populations, often by threats, sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to the rest. To make sure the Arabs couldn't return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into the water wells.

Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, has written and spoken about the use of bacteriological agents. According to Mileshtin, Moshe Dayan, a division commander at the time, gave orders in 1948 to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and render water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria.

Acre was so situated that it could practically defend itself with one big gun, so the Haganah put bacteria into the spring that fed the town. The spring was called Capri and it ran from the north near a kibbutz. The Haganah put typhus bacteria into the water going to Acre, the people got sick, and the Jewish forces occupied Acre. This worked so well that they sent a Haganah division dressed as Arabs into Gaza, where there were Egyptian forces, and the Egyptians caught them putting two cans of bacteria, typhus and dysentery, into the water supply in wanton disregard of the civilian population. "In war, there is no sentiment," one of the captured Haganah men was quoted as saying.

My activism in Israel began shortly after I received a letter from the Socialist/Zionist Party asking me to help with their Arabic newspaper. When I showed up at their offices at Central Housein Tel Aviv, I asked around to see just where I should report. I showed the letter to a couple of people there and, without even looking at it, they would motion me away with the words, "Room No. 8." When I saw that they weren't even reading the letter, I inquired of several others.But the response was the same, "Room No. 8," with not a glance at the paper I put in front of them.

So I went to Room 8 and saw that it was the Department of Jews from Islamic Countries. I was disgusted and angry. Either I am a member of the party or I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different politics because I am an Arab Jew? It's segregation, I thought, just like a Negroes' Department. I turned around and walked out. That was the start of my open protests. That same year I organized a demonstration in Ashkelon against Ben Gurion's racist policies and 10,000 people turned out.

There wasn't much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens to do much about it when Israel was on a war footing with outside enemies. After the 1967 war, I was in the Army myself and served in the Sinai when there was continued fighting along the Suez Canal. But the cease-fire with Egypt in 1970 gave us our opening. We took to the streets and organized politically to demand equal rights. If it's our country, if we were expected to risk our lives in a border war, then we expected equal treatment.

We mounted the struggle so tenaciously and received so much publicity that the Israeli government tried to discredit our movement by calling us "Israel's Black Panthers." They were thinking in racist terms, really, in assuming the Israeli public would reject an organization whose ideology was being compared to that of radical blacks in the United States. But we saw that what we were doing was no different than what blacks in the United States were fighting against-segregation, discrimination, unequal treatment. Rather than reject the label, we adopted it proudly. I had posters of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and other civil rights activists plastered all over my office.

With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatilla massacres, I had had enough of Israel. I became a United States citizen and made certain to revoke my Israeli citizenship. I could never have written and published my book in Israel, not with the censorship they would impose.

Even in America, I had great difficulty finding a publisher because many are subject to pressures of one kind or another from Israel and its friends. I ended up paying $60,000 from my own pocket to publish Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews, virtually the entire proceeds from having sold my house in Israel.

I still was afraid that the printer would back out or that legal proceedings would be initiated to stop its publication, like the Israeli government did in an attempt to prevent former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky from publishing his first book. Ben Gurion's Scandals had to be translated into English from two languages. I wrote in Hebrew when I was in Israel and hoped to publish the book there, and I wrote in Arabic when I was completing the book after coming to theU.S. But I was so worried that something would stop publication that I told the printer not to wait for the translations to be thoroughly checked and proofread. Now I realize that the publicity of a lawsuit would just have created a controversial interest in the book.

I am using bank vault storage for the valuable documents that back up what I have written. These documents, including some that I illegally copied from the archives at Yad Vashem, confirm what I saw myself, what I was told by other witnesses, and what reputable historians and others have written concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of violence and death inflicted by Jews on Jews in the cause of creating Israel.

The Riots of 1941

If, as I have said, my family in Iraq was not persecuted personally and I knew no deprivation as a member of the Jewish minority, what led me to the steps of the gallows as a member of the Zionist underground? To answer that question, it is necessary to establish the context of the massacre that occurred in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, when several hundred Iraqi Jews were killed in riots involving junior officers of the Iraqi army. I was 12 years of age and many of those killed were my friends. I was angry, and very confused.

What I didn't know at the time was that the riots most likely were stirred up by the British, in collusion with a pro-British Iraqi leadership.

With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following WW I, Iraq came under British "tutelage." Amir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman sultan, was brought in from Mecca by the British to become King of Iraq in 1921. Many Jews were appointed to key administrative posts, including that of economics minister. Britain retained final authority over domestic and external affairs. Britain's pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however, triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries. Writing at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain's Ambassador in Baghdad, noted that, while before WWI Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then "Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist."

King Faisal died in 1933. He was succeeded by his son Ghazi, who died in a motor car accident in 1939. The crown then passed to Ghazi's 4-year-old son, Faisal II, whose uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was named regent. Abd al-Ilah selected Nouri el-Said as prime minister. El-Said supported the British and, as hatred of the British grew, he was forced from office in March 1940 by four senior army officers who advocated Iraq's independence from Britain. Calling themselves the Golden Square, the officers compelled the regent to name as prime minister Rashid Ali al-Kilani, leader of the National Brotherhood party.

The time was 1940 and Britain was reeling from a strong German offensive. Al-Kilani and the Golden Square saw this as their opportunity to rid themselves of the British once and for all. Cautiously they began to negotiate for German support, which led the pro-British regent Abd al-Ilah to dismiss al-Kilani in January 1941. By April, however, the Golden Square officers had reinstated the Prime Minister.

This provoked the British to send a military force into Basra on April 12, 1941. Basra, Iraq's second largest city, had a Jewish population of 30,000. Most of these Jews made their livings from import/export, money changing, retailing, as workers in the airports, railways, and ports, or as senior government employees.

On the same day, April 12, supporters of the pro-British regent notified the Jewish leaders that the regent wanted to meet with them. As was their custom, the leaders brought flowers for the regent. Contrary to custom, however, the cars that drove them to the meeting place dropped them off at the site where the British soldiers were concentrated.

Photographs of the Jews appeared in the following day's newspapers with the banner "Basra Jews Receive British Troops with Flowers." That same day, April 13, groups of angry Arab youths set about to take revenge against the Jews. Several Muslim notables in Basra heard of the plan and calmed things down. Later, it was learned that the regent was not in Basra at all and that the matter was a provocation by his pro-British supporters to bring about an ethnic war in order to give the British army a pretext to intervene.

The British continued to land more forces in and around Basra. On May 7, 1941, their Gurkha unit, composed of Indian soldiers from that ethnic group, occupied Basra's el-Oshar quarter, a neighborhood with a large Jewish population. The soldiers, led by British officers, began looting. Many shops in the commercial district were plundered. Private homes were broken into. Cases of attempted rape were reported. Local residents, Jews and Muslims, responded with pistols and old rifles, but their bullets were no match for the soldiers' Tommy Guns. Afterwards, it was learned that the soldiers acted with the acquiescence, if not the blessing, of their British commanders. (It should be remembered that the Indian soldiers, especially those of the Gurkha unit, were known for their discipline, and it is highly unlikely they would have acted so riotously without orders.) The British goal clearly was to create chaos and to blacken the image of the pro-nationalist regime in Baghdad, thereby giving the British forces reason to proceed to the capital and to overthrow the al-Kilani government.

Baghdad fell on May 30. Al-Kilani fled to Iran, along with the Golden Square officers. Radio stations run by the British reported that Regent Abd al-Ilah would be returning to the city and that thousands of Jews and others were planning to welcome him. What inflamed young Iraqis against the Jews most, however, was the radio announcer Yunas Bahri on the German station "Berlin," who reported in Arabic that Jews from Palestine were fighting alongside the British against Iraqi soldiers near the city of Faluja. The report was false.

On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in Baghdad between Jews who were still celebrating their Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who thought the Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British regent. That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus, removed the Jewish passengers,murdered one and fatally wounded a second.

About 8:30 the following morning, some 30 individuals in military and police uniforms opened fire along el-Amin street, a small downtown street whose jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned. By 11 a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and clubs were attacking Jewish homes in the area.

The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2. During this time, many Muslims rose to defend their Jewish neighbors, while some Jews successfully defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400 injured, according to a report written by a Jewish Agency messenger who was in Iraq at the time. Other estimates, possibly less reliable, put the death toll higher, as many as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to 1,300 stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were looted.

Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter? Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the Zionist underground movement in Iraq, known then as Yehoshafat, claims it was the British. Meir, who now works for the Israeli Defense Ministry, argues that, in order to make it appear that the regent was returning as the savior who would reestablish law and order, the British stirred up the riots against the most vulnerable and visible segment in the city, the Jews. And, not surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent's loyal soldiers entered the capital.

My own investigations as a journalist lead me to believe Meir is correct. Furthermore, I think his claims should be seen as based on documents in the archives of the Israeli Defense Ministry, the agency that published his book. Yet, even before his book came out, I had independent confirmation from a man I met in Iran in the late Forties.

His name was Michael Timosian, an Iraqi Armenian. When I met him he was working as a male nurse at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan in the south of Iran. On June 2, 1941, however, he wasworking at the Baghdad hospital where many of the riot victims were brought. Most of these victims were Jews.

Timosian said he was particularly interested in two patients whose conduct did not follow local custom. One had been hit by a bullet in his shoulder, the other by a bullet in his right knee. After the doctor removed the bullets, the staff tried to change their blood-soaked cloths. But the two men fought off their efforts, pretending to be speechless, although tests showed they could hear. To pacify them, the doctor injected them with anesthetics and, as they were sleeping,Timosian changed their cloths. He discovered that one of them had around his neck an identification tag of the type used by British troops, while the other had tattoos with Indian script on his right arm along with the familiar sword of the Gurkha.

The next day when Timosian showed up for work, he was told that a British officer, his sergeant and two Indian Gurkha soldiers had come to the hospital early that morning. Staff members overheard the Gurkha soldiers talking with the wounded patients, who were not as dumb as they had pretended. The patients saluted the visitors, covered themselves with sheets and, without signing the required release forms, left the hospital with their visitors.

Today there is no doubt in my mind that the anti-Jewish riots of 1941 were orchestrated by the British for geopolitical ends. David Kimche is certainly a man who was in a position to know the truth, and he has spoken publicly about British culpability. Kimche had been with British Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad after the war. Later he became Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, the position he held in 1982 when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for International Affairs in London.

In responding to hostile questions about Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the refugee camp massacres in Beirut, Kimche went on the attack, reminding the audience that there was scant concern in the British Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in the murder of 500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941.

The Bombings of 1950-1951

The anti-Jewish riots of 1941 did more than create a pretext for the British to enter Baghdad to reinstate the pro-British regent and his pro-British prime minister, Nouri el-Said. They also gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara, Hillah, Diwaneia, Abril and Karkouk.

Following WWII, a succession of governments held brief power in Iraq. Zionist conquests in Palestine, particularly the massacre of Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, emboldened the anti-British movement in Iraq. When the Iraqi government signed a new treaty of friendship with London in January 1948, riots broke out all over the country. The treaty was quickly abandoned and Baghdad demanded removal of the British military mission that had run Iraq's army for 27 years.

Later in 1948, Baghdad sent an army detachment to Palestine to fight the Zionists, and when Israel declared independence in May, Iraq closed the pipeline that fed its oil to Haifa's refinery. Abd al-Ilah, however, was still regent and the British quisling, Nouri el-Said, was back as prime minister. I was in the Abu-Greib prison in 1948, where I would remain until my escape to Iran in September 1949.

Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.

The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad's El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately. The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues.

On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.

On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the from Iraq be increased.

On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.

On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.

Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.

Among the most important documents in my book, I believe, are copies of two leaflets published by the Zionist underground calling on Jews to leave Iraq. One is dated March 16, 1950, the other April 8, 1950.

The difference between these two is critical. Both indicate the date of publication, but only the April 8th leaflet notes the time of day: 4 p.m. Why the time of day? Such a specification was unprecedented. Even the investigating judge, Salaman El-Beit, found it suspicious. Did the 4 p.m. writers want an alibi for a bombing they knew would occur five hours later? If so, how did they know about the bombing? The judge concluded they knew because a connection existed between the Zionist underground and the bomb throwers.

This, too, was the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whom I had the opportunity to meet in New York in 1988. In his book, Ropes of Sand, whose publication the CIA opposed, Eveland writes:

In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had "rescued" really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish population."

Eveland doesn't detail the evidence linking the Zionists to the attacks, but in my book I do. In 1955, for example, I organized in Israel a panel of Jewish attorneys of Iraqi origin to handle claims of Iraqi Jews who still had property in Iraq. One well known attorney, who asked that I not give his name, confided in me that the laboratory tests in Iraq had confirmed that the anti-American leaflets found at the American Cultural Center bombing were typed on the same typewriter and duplicated on the same stenciling machine as the leaflets distributed by the Zionist movement just before the April 8th bombing.

Tests also showed that the type of explosive used in the Beit-Lawi attack matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew by the name of Yosef Basri. Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom Salih, a shoemaker, would be put on trial for the attacks in December 1951 and executed the following month. Both men were members of Hashura, the military arm of the Zionist underground. Salih ultimately confessed that he, Basri and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks.

By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but 6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel. Moreover, the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn't return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.

The Ultimate Criminals

Zionist Leaders. From the start they knew that in order to establish a Jewish state they had to expel the indigenous Palestinian population to the neighboring Islamic states and import Jews from these same states.
Theodor Herzl, the architect of Zionism, thought it could be done by social engineering. In his diary entry for 12 June 1885, he wrote that Zionist settlers would have to "spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country."
Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prime Minister Netanyahu's ideological progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could only be brought about by force.
David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, told a Zionist Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to "transfer Arab populations out of the area, if possible of their own free will, if not by coercion." After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to look to the Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the resultant cheap labor market. "Emissaries" were smuggled into these countries to "convince" Jews to leave either by trickery or fear.

In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them.

A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a book was published in Iraq, in Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. The author was one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book, he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the emissaries sent by Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all copies just disappeared, even from libraries. The word was that agents of the Israeli Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up all the books and destroyed them. I tried on three different occasions to have one sent to me in Israel, but each time Israeli censors in the post office intercepted it. British Leaders. Britain always acted in its best colonial interests. For that reason Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour sent his famous 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I. During WW II the British were primarily concerned with keeping their client states in the Western camp, while Zionists were most concerned with the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant cooperating with the Nazis. (In my book I document numerous instances of such dealings by Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership.) After WW II the international chessboard pitted communists against capitalists. In many countries, including the United States and Iraq, Jews represented a large part of the Communist party. In Iraq, hundreds of Jews of the working intelligentsia occupied key positions in the hierarchy of the Communist and Socialist parties. To keep their client countries in the capitalist camp, Britain had to make sure these governments had pro-British leaders. And if, as in Iraq, these leaders were overthrown, then an anti-Jewish riot or two could prove a useful pretext to invade the capital and reinstate the "right" leaders.

Moreover, if the possibility existed of removing the communist influence from Iraq by transferring the whole Jewish community to Israel, well then, why not? Particularly if the leaders of Israel and Iraq conspired in the deed.

The following article, The Jews of Iraq, is the result of an interview conducted by The Link on March 16, 1998. The article was published in the [?] edition of The Link. The interviewee, Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew and a former Zionist is the author of "Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews".

The Iraqi Leaders. Both the regent Abd al-Ilah and his prime minister Nouri el- Said took directions from London. Toward the end of 1948, el-Said, who had already met with Israel's Prime Minister Ben Gurion in Vienna, began discussing with his Iraqi and British associates the need for an exchange of populations. Iraq would send the Jews in military trucks to Israel via Jordan, and Iraq would take in some of the Palestinians Israel had been evicting. His proposal included mutual confiscation of property. London nixed the idea as too radical.

El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to create the conditions that would make the lives of Iraqi Jews so miserable they would leave for Israel. Jewish government employees were fired from their jobs; Jewish merchants were denied import/export licenses; police began to arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did not leave in any great numbers. In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat, the one mentioned in Venom of the Zionist Viper, to Iraq. One of the first things Ben-Porat did was to approach el-Said and promise him financial incentives to have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi Jews.

Soon after, Zionist and Iraqi representatives began formulating a rough draft of the bill, according to the model dictated by Israel through its agents in Baghdad. The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March 1950. It empowered the government to issue one-time exit visas to Jews wishing to leave the country. In March, the bombings began.

Sixteen years later, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs. As I said, all this went well beyond the comprehension of a teenager. I knew Jews were being killed and an organization existed that could lead us to the Promised Land. So I helped in the exodus to Israel. Later, on occasions, I would bump into some of these Iraqi Jews in Israel. Not infrequently they'd express the sentiment that they could kill me for what I had done.

Opportunities for Peace

After the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya in October, 1953, Ben Gurion went into voluntary exile at the Sedeh Boker kibbutz in the Negev. The Labor party then used to organize many buses for people to go visit him there, where they would see the former prime minister working with sheep. But that was only for show. Really he was writing his diary and continuing to be active behind the scenes. I went on such a tour.

We were told not to try to speak to Ben Gurion, but when I saw him, I asked why, since Israel is a democracy with a parliament, does it not have a constitution? Ben Gurion said, "Look, boy"-I was 24 at the time-"if we have a constitution, we have to write in it the border of our country. And this is not our border, my dear." I asked, "Then where is the border?" He said, "Wherever the Sahal will come, this is the border." Sahal is the Israeli army.

Ben Gurion told the world that Israel accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it. Then Israel took half of the land that was promised to the Arab state. And still he was saying it was not enough. Israel needed more land. How can a country make peace with its neighbors if it wants to take their land? How can a country demand to be secure if it won't say what borders it will be satisfied with? For such a country, peace would be an inconvenience. I know now that from the beginning many Arab leaders wanted to make peace with Israel, but Israel always refused. Ben Gurion covered this up with propaganda. He said that the Arabs wanted to drive Israel into the sea and he called Gamal Abdel Nasser the Hitler of the Middle East whose foremost intent was to destroy Israel. He wanted America and Great Britain to treat Nasser like a pariah.

In 1954, it seemed that America was getting less critical of Nasser. Then during a three-week period in July, several terrorist bombs were set off: at the United States Information Agency offices in Cairo and Alexandria, a British-owned theater, and the central post office in Cairo. An attempt to firebomb a cinema in Alexandria failed when the bomb went off in the pocket of one of the perpetrators. That led to the discovery that the terrorists were not anti-Western Egyptians, but were instead Israeli spies bent on souring the warming relationship between Egypt and the United States in what came to be known as the Lavon Affair.

Ben Gurion was still living on his kibbutz. Moshe Sharett as prime minister was in contact with Abdel Nasser through the offices of Lord Maurice Orbach of Great Britain. Sharett asked Nasser to be lenient with the captured spies, and Nasser did all that was in his power to prevent a deterioration of the situation between the two countries.

Then Ben Gurion returned as Defense Minister in February, 1955. Later that month Israeli troops attacked Egyptian military camps and Palestinian refugees in Gaza, killing 54 and injuring many more. The very night of the attack, Lord Orbach was on his way to deliver a message to Nasser, but was unable to get through because of the military action. When Orbach telephoned, Nasser's secretary told him that the attack proved that Israel did not want peace and that he was wasting his time as a mediator.

In November, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset that he was willing to meet with Abdel Nasser anywhere and at any time for the sake of peace and understanding. The next morning the Israeli military attacked an Egyptian military camp in the Sabaha region.

Although Nasser felt pessimistic about achieving peace with Israel, he continued to send other mediators to try. One was through the American Friends Service Committee; another via the Prime Minister of Malta, Dom Minthoff; and still another through Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. One that looked particularly promising was through Dennis Hamilton, editor of The London Times. Nasser told Hamilton that if only he could sit and talk with Ben Gurion for two or three hours, they would be able to settle the conflict and end the state of war between the two countries. When word of this reached Ben Gurion, he arranged to meet with Hamilton. They decided to pursue the matter with the Israeli ambassador in London, Arthur Luria, as liaison. On Hamilton's third trip to Egypt, Nasser met him with the text of a Ben Gurion speech stating that Israel would not give up an inch of land and would not take back a single refugee. Hamilton knew that Ben Gurion with his mouth had undermined a peace mission and missed an opportunity to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Nasser even sent his friend Ibrahim Izat of the Ruz El Yusuf weekly paper to meet with Israeli leaders in order to explore the political atmosphere and find out why the attacks were taking place if Israel really wanted peace. One of the men Izat met with was Yigal Yadin, a former Chief of Staff of the army who wrote this letter to me on 14 January 1982:

Dear Mr. Giladi:
Your letter reminded me of an event which I nearly forgot and of which I remember only a few details.

Ibrahim Izat came to me if I am not mistaken under the request of the Foreign Ministry or one of its branches; he stayed in my house and we spoke for many hours. I do not remember him saying that he came on a mission from Nasser, but I have no doubt that he let it be understood that this was with his knowledge or acquiescence....

When Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal in spite of opposition from the British and the French, Radio Cairo announced in Hebrew:

If the Israeli government is not influenced by the British and the French imperialists, it will eventually result in greater understanding between the two states, and Egypt will reconsider Israel's request to have access to the Suez Canal.

Israel responded that it had no designs on Egypt, but at that very moment Israeli representatives were in France planning the three-way attack that was to take place in October, 1956. All the while, Ben Gurion continued to talk about the Hitler of the Middle East. This brainwashing went on until late September, 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser passed away. Then, miracle of miracles, David Ben Gurion told the press:

A week before he died I received an envoy from Abdel Nasser who asked to meet with me urgently in order to solve the problems between Israel and the Arab world. The public was surprised because they didn't know that Abdel Nasser had wanted this all along, but Israel sabotaged it.

Nasser was not the only Arab leader who wanted to make peace with Israel. There were many others. Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qasem, before he seized power in Iraq in July, 1958, headed an underground organization that sent a delegation to Israel to make a secret agreement. Ben Gurion refused even to see him. I learned about this when I was a journalist in Israel. But whenever I tried to publish even a small part of it, the censor would stamp it "Not Allowed." Now, in Netanyahu, we are witnessing another attempt by an Israeli prime minister to fake an interest in making peace. Netanyahu and the Likud are setting Arafat up by demanding that he institute more and more repressive measures in the interest of Israeli "security." Sooner or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafat's strong-arm methods as Israel's quisling-and he'll be killed. Then the Israeli government will say, "See, we were ready to give him everything. You can't trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now there's no one to even talk to about peace."

Conclusion

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.

These players, I believe, should be held accountable for their crimes, particularly when they willfully terrorized, dispossessed and killed innocent people on the altar of some ideological imperative.

I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders have a moral responsibility to compensate the victims and their descendants, and to do so not just with reparations, but by setting the historical record straight.

That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel to seek reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to leave behind their property and possessions in Iraq. That is why I joined the Black Panthers in confronting the Israeli government with the grievances of the Jews in Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I have written my book and this article: to set the historical record straight.

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

ENDNOTES

Mileshtin was quoted by the Israeli daily, Hadashot, in an article published August 13, 1993. The writer, Sarah Laybobis-Dar, interviewed a number of Israelis who had knowledge of the use of bacteriological weapons in the 1948 war. Mileshtin said bacteria was used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants.

On Sept. 12, 1990, the New York State Supreme Court issued a restraining order at the request of the Israeli government to prevent publication of Ostrovsky's book, "By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer." The New York State Appeals Court lifted the ban the next day.